Recipe — daal

I’ve been thinking about linearity in cooking. Suppose you want to cook one kg meat.

Suppose the recipe says you need two onions. Does it mean, for 500g you need one onion, and for two kg you need four? If so, we have a recipe where the meat is homogenous to degree 1 in onion.

What food items are HD 1 in all ingredients? Over what ranges? What food items exhibit returns to scale — that is, you don’t need proportionately as many onions as you vary the quantity? Does it vary systematically between, say, Deshi and French food? Don’t even get me started on quasi-concavity.

Wash some daal — red lentil needs to be washed very, very carefully — and microwave it in water with turmeric and salt until it boils. How much turmeric and how much water? Depends on how strongly you care about your fingers (assuming you eat with finger) and how ‘watery’ you want the final product to be. While it’s boiling, fry some onion and garlic — ratio of one medium sized onion to one clove of garlic — in mustard oil. Put them in boiling daal. Just before the boiling finishes, put some fresh coriander and sliced green chili.

The simpler way

Wash the daal. Microwave it with water and salt. Add some ghee and sliced green chili after it has boiled.